Since March 2011, the Syrian revolution has been shaped by a discursive battle between, first, the regime and its peaceful opponents and, under conditions of escalating violence, an array of opposition forces. In the media, state and non-state actors have vied for the right to tell an authoritative story of events in Syria. This struggle has been reflected among intellectuals and activists of various generations, who have drawn on political theories of revolution to frame the chaos of events in Syria within narratives of sociopolitical transformation that have recognizable ends and implicit legitimacy. The sources for these narratives of revolution reflect a range of sources, from classical leftist thought to contemporary social theory. Meanwhile, Syria’s creative producers – makers of literature and film – are typically seen to provide the raw material for these theories by bearing witness to a nation’s devastation, on one hand, and its people’s unfaltering resolve, on the other. But can events in Syria be so smoothly translated into existing theories of revolution? If we can acknowledge the possibility of breakdowns in this process, then how might we engage with Syria’s cultural actors not just as witnesses, but as creative participants in the task of theorization itself? More broadly, what insights into Syria’s ongoing transformation might be lost when scholarship limits itself to reproducing accounts of seamless revolutionary witnessing and theorization? This paper combines readings of short documentary films by the Abounaddara Collective and a recent wave of sociological studies by a new generation of secular, anti-regime activists. It suggests that the micro-focus of these works reflects a turn among Syrian intellectuals and cultural producers towards documenting the local after decades of dictatorship supported by macro-ideologies. Through its readings, this paper complicates the above account of revolutionary theorization by drawing attention to two points of tension that unsettle these sociological and creative works: Syria’s Islamic movements, on one hand, and pro-regime Alawite communities, on the other. It does so in order to draw our attention to the difficult but necessarily innovative intellectual and creative labor these activists are performing to theorize a Syrian revolution that does not - even, for some, cannot - conform to pre-existing narratives of sociopolitical change. Rather, this paper suggests that it is around these sites of purported revolutionary breakdown in Syria that truly localized narratives of sociopolitical transformation are emerging.